Sons of the 613 (28 page)

“No.”

“Isaac, fuck you. Give me the fucking keys.”

I stop.

“No,” I say, “fuck
you.
” Then I let the keys drop, and they rattle through the parallel bars of a sewer grate. I don't hear them hit bottom, however far down that might be.

“Oh, goddamn it, Isaac.”

He sits down on the curb and puts his head in his hands.

I realize I don't know how to get a taxi. In the movies people always just wave their arms or whistle, but that's always in New York. I don't think it works that way here. I pull out his cell phone, thinking that I'll call information, and freeze. There's a voice message from our home phone. It has to be Lisa.

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: J
UNIOR
D
OCTOR

In the cab I try calling the house again, but no one answers. Lisa was scared in her message, crying, asking where we were, saying she was sick and her head hurt. I picture her alone and unconscious and dying while a party rages around her and we're in some stupid bar downtown. I redial. Nothing.

“Shit!” I jab the end call button.

The cab driver took one look at us and didn't want to take us. I offered him a hundred dollars from Josh's wallet. He took us.

It's a long, tense ride, and I drum on my legs and jiggle my feet. Josh is slumped down, leaning against the door and staring up and out the window like he's lost in thought.

“She said she was going to move to New York with me,” says Josh out of nowhere, still looking out the window.

“Trish?”

He doesn't answer. Instead, after a long pause he says, “I hated it there. Hated school. Couldn't hack it. Total fail. I failed, Isaac. Didn't even like wrestling anymore.”

“But you're going back,” I say. “You're going back, right?”

Again he doesn't answer. After more looking out the window he says, “You know what you should do? You should get a tattoo of a dragon.”

“What?”

“A dragon. Get one here,” he says, pointing to the inside of his forearm.

“What are you talking about?”

“I think it's your spirit animal. You kept talking about dragons that night I found you in the woods during the storm.”

“Josh, are you joining the Marines?”

Nothing.

“Are you joining the Marines?”

“Yep.”

“Do Mom and Dad know?”

“Nope.”

“But you can't! When?”

“The day after your bar mitzvah.”

“Josh, no! They'll send you to Afghanistan!”

“Hope so,” he says.

Now I'm the one who's quiet, thinking.

Then, “There's no such thing as spirit animals, Josh. It's bullshit.
You're
bullshit. You and all your crap. Your tattoo and your frigging yarmulke. It's just like Patrick with his stupid Mohawk and leather jacket, just something to put on so you can be different and show off. All bullshit. This whole two weeks has been bullshit.”

He watches me talk, expressionless, maybe not even hearing me. Then he turns back to the window.

 

When we arrive at the house the cars are gone from our driveway and from the block. I'm out of the cab a lot faster than Josh, not caring if he's coming or not. I can see the extent of the damage to the front lawn: an S curve of tire tracks slashing diagonally across from the driveway to the curb. Before I go in the front entrance I take a quick moment to note the splintered wound in the garage door.

 

The house seems empty, all the partiers gone. It's a wreck, plastic cups and bottles everywhere, a large spill in the entrance hallway that countless people have tracked through. I go right to Lisa's room, the hallway light enough to illuminate her in her bed. She's asleep, flushed, tossing about. Her forehead is hot as hell. I get the thermometer from the bathroom across the hall. Josh is there when I get back, hunched over her. He straightens when I come in.

“She's really sick!” he says. He looks freaked out. “Look at her face!”

“Josh, she's got Terri's frigging makeup smeared all over her face.”

“She's burning up! You have to get the thermometer.”

“I've got it.”

“Give it here.”

“I'll do it.”

“Give me it!”

I hand it to him. Of course he can't get it to work. He keeps pressing the button too many times and resetting it before he puts it in Lisa's ear, and then he swears each time he reads the error message on the display.

“Here,” I say, then just take it from him. “Move over,” I say, and he does, and I take her temperature.

“One hundred and three point four,” I say.

“Oh, man, that's really high. That's really high.” He's looking even more freaked out and helpless. Helpless and overwhelmed, like a child, a way I've never seen him before. “She could be in a coma!”

“She's not in a coma. She's asleep.”

“Lisa!” He starts shaking her.

“Josh, let her sleep. She's just sick. She probably has strep. The fever, all of it, these are exactly her symptoms when she has strep.”

“Lisa!” He shakes her more. She opens her eyes and starts bawling.

He holds on to her as she cries and says her head hurts, her throat hurts.

“She has strep,” I say. “Remember the diagnosis game I play with Dad?” He ignores me, trying to get her to quiet down.

“We gotta go to the hospital or something,” he says. “I'm gonna call an ambulance.”

“What?”

“We have to get her to the hospital! She could have—I don't know! She could have anything!”

I'm not sure why, but somehow that statement doesn't help calm Lisa down. She starts bawling harder.

“I don't wanna go to the ho-ho-hospital!” she sobs.

“I'm calling an ambulance,” says Josh, clumsily trying to dial his phone. I can already envision being stuck in the emergency room for the rest of the night while they deal with actual emergencies. Plus, someone probably reported what happened at the bar, and there Josh would be, showing up at the hospital, all bruised and matching the description of the idiot who started the fight.

“Wait!” I say. “Just hold on!”

“Where are you going?” says Josh.

“I'll be right back.”

I sprint across the hall to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, find one of my dad's pen flashlights, the kind with an advertisement on it for some sort of medication. Back across the hall.

“Lisa, let me see your throat.”

She does. I shine the light in. Her throat is covered with white spots.

“See? It's strep. We'll get her penicillin tomorrow and she'll be fine. Let's go to bed.”

“What are you talking about? I'm calling an ambulance!”

“You're driving me insane! Look, stay here, don't call an ambulance!”

Now I run down the hall, down the stairs, to my parents' bathroom. On the way there I spot more party wreckage, including Mr. Olsen and two random people passed out on the L-shaped sofa. I don't stop to check on them. In a drawer in my parents' bathroom I find a rapid strep test, which my dad keeps on hand because Lisa gets it so often.

When I straighten up I spy myself in the mirror and pause for an instant, fascinated. I have a deep cut that splits my right eyebrow, which looks like it's going to heal into a scar like the one Josh has. The area under that eye is starting to purple into a black eye to match the one on the other side. Each nostril is decorated with that dark red crust you get when you have a bloody nose, so I guess I must have had one. I don't have time to wash the cut, but it's starting to bleed again, and as I leave the bathroom I snag a washcloth to press against it.

I run back to the stairs, get halfway up, pause, go back down to the sofa to give Mr. Olsen and the other two a hard shake. Only Mr. Olsen responds with anything resembling consciousness.

“Whuh?” he says, opening his eyes and sort of focusing on me.

“Mr. Olsen, it's time to go home.”

“Whah?”

“Time to go. Isn't your wife waiting for you?”

“She's outta town.” He closes his eyes again. I shake him again.

“Mr. Olsen, you
have
to
leave.
”

“Leave?”

“GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR HOUSE!”

“Jeez, kid.”

“And wake these two other idiots up and get them out, too. Now. NOW!! GET UP!!” I yell, kicking at his shins for good measure.

I can hear him mumbling and muttering behind me as I sprint up the stairs to Lisa's room.

Josh is sitting next to her on the bed, stroking her forehead. He still looks panicked. I doubt he was this scared when
I
was sick.

“I'm calling an ambulance,” he says again.

“Hold on. Lisa, open your mouth.”

I've watched my dad do this half a dozen times, and try to imitate his deft motion with the throat swab. Then I put it in the test tube and wait and dab it on the little strip and maybe ten seconds go by before the two parallel lines appear.

“There. Positive. It's strep. Good night.”

“She's never had that before.”

“Josh, Lisa gets strep, like, every two goddamn weeks, but you just don't pay enough attention to know it. She's a carrier of group A streptococcus.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

How is it that after every absolutely bizarre thing that has happened this week, that one statement makes me angrier than anything?

“I might be a total pussy, Josh, but I
do
know what I'm talking about,” I say to him, very quietly. “And you know it.”

I can hear Mr. Olsen and the people from downstairs talking drunkenly as they make their way to the front door. One of them is speaking stridently now, arguing with the others. I can't tell what he's saying, but he sounds remarkably like my—

Holy shit.

“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” I can hear him clearly now, very clearly.

Josh looks up.

“Oh my God,” says a very familiar female voice. “Oh my
God.
Herb, look at this place! I am going to kill Josh!”

“Oh, shit,” say Josh and I together.

My mom punches Josh, the final punch of two weeks of punches. Right in his already-bruised and bloody face.

A girl punch, I guess he'd say, the wind-up all awkward and the fist in the wrong position, but I swear that punch hurts him more than anything that happened at the bar. It's like a magic wand, the contact instantly converting him back to being a child. He puts his hand up to the spot and his eyes go teary, the first time I've ever seen him close to crying.

My mom is certainly crying. Scary crying. Hysterical furious shrieking out-of-control incoherent sentences crying. I've never seen her like this. After she hits him, she screams, “I can't stand you! I want you out of this house, and I never want to see you again!”

It's worse than the punch. I can see it. At first I think Josh will just shrug it off like he has shrugged off everything my parents have ever said, but this destroys him.

Everyone gets beat up, Patrick said. This is Josh getting beat up.

The house is trashed. The lawn is ruined. There are drunken strangers in the foyer. Your clothes are shredded and your face is bruised and bleeding. Your little sister, whom you were supposed to be taking care of, has French braids, is wearing fingernail polish, lipstick, and eye shadow, and has strep throat. Your little brother, whom you were also supposed to be taking care of, has two black eyes, a screwed-up ear piercing, and a claw mark on his face, and is bleeding steadily from a split eyebrow. What do you do? If you're Josh, you stride out to the entranceway and demand, “Mom, Dad, what the
hell
are you guys doing here?”

I heard it all from Lisa's room, where I was hiding.

“What's going on?” said Lisa.

“Mom and Dad are back,” I said. “Shhh.”

I could hear my mom and dad yelling at Josh and could track their progress through the house, marked by an exclamation of outrage at each new discovery: the charred countertop; the trashed condition of the living room; the shelf of snuff bottles Terri had destroyed (“My
snuff bottles!
” I heard my mom wail).

While my mom was screaming at Josh, I heard the heavier sound of my dad passing in the hallway outside Lisa's room, on his way to my room.
Oh, God,
I thought,
I hope Patrick and Terri aren't
—

“Who the hell are you?” my dad roared. “What the hell is this?”

A few seconds later Lisa's door opened. I shot out into the hallway past my dad before he could grab me.

“Hey, Dad,” I said as I receded down the hallway, washcloth against my face. “That's Patrick and Terri in my room. They're okay people. Also, I just administered a rapid strep test to Lisa and it came back positive.”

 

This was all prepunch. I ended up colliding into my mom as she rounded the corner to the hallway. “And what happened to you?” she said, and roughly pulled the cloth away. She was white-hot raging at that point, but when she saw my face is when she really lost it.

“What did you
do
to him?!” she shrieked at Josh, and the scary crying started. “Nothing,” I kept saying, “he didn't do anything,” but I would have needed a bullhorn for her to hear me, and that's when she hauled off and let him have it.

 

Now she's shrieking: “Herb. Herb! Have you seen Izzie?!!”

“Mom, I'm okay,” I keep repeating. Josh is now sitting on the floor, head in hands, crying. Josh is
crying,
his body racked with sobs. Our dad is talking at the same time as our mom, saying that there are strange people in Izzie's room, Lisa has a fever, and Christ, look at Izzie's face, Jesus, what happened to you, and what the hell is this goddamn dog doing here?! He kicks at Joey, who is yapping at everyone.